Michael Chabon's introduction to McSweeney's Mammoth Book of Thrilling Tales says: "As late as about 1950, if I referred to 'short fiction', I might have been talking about any one of the following kinds of stories: the ghost story; the horror story; the detective story; the story of suspense, terror, fantasy, or the macabre; the sea, adventure, spy, war or historical story; the romance story. Stories, in other words, with plots." Nowadays, complains Chabon, all we get is the " 'contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story' ", and it is his purpose in this anthology, originally published as issue 10 of the literary magazine McSweeney's, and now available as a book, to redress this balance with stories written in those genres he evokes.

Borrowing the aggressively self-deprecating tone beloved of McSweeney's editor, Dave Eggers, Chabon describes his thesis as "semi-coherent, ill-reasoned, and doubtless mistaken", and it is. Where do writers of experimental short fiction such as Donald Barthelme and Guy Davenport fit in? Is "plot" the same as physical action? In its perfunctory way, Chabon's introduction takes its place in the continuing argument about how serious writing has lost touch with entertainment values, how books used to be interesting until Modernism came along and made them fit only for academics, but doesn't add much to it. It's just a cool idea for an anthology, and what with the Harry Potterisation of publishing, it's a canny one too.

The book looks like a '40s pulp-fiction magazine, including advertisements for correspondence courses and hangover cures. The air of camp is reinforced further by the uneasy tone and varying quality of the work inside. (It's also printed in double columns, which is a trial at first, but you do get used to it.) It's an enjoyable book and does extend your sense of literary possibility, but it's a bit of a mess.

Real popular writers such as Elmore Leonard, Stephen King and Michael Crichton share space with highbrow writers such as Dave Eggers and Rick Moody and Sherman Alexie. Some of the stories are straightforward yarns, such as Leonard's How Carlos Webster Changed His Name to Carl and Became a Famous Oklahoma Lawman, one of the best things in the book. Some give a highbrow gloss to genre elements, like Moody's The Albertine Notes, a science-fiction noir set in the future ruins of New York, which also riffs on themes of memory and addiction; or, like Dave Eggers in Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly, make a token effort to include them without going too far outside their usual concerns. And some are just baffling, like Aimee Bender's The Case of the Salt and Pepper Shakers, which uses detective-story tricks with a deliberate lack of finesse in pursuit of weightless symbolism.

Some of the pieces are spot on. Dan Chaon's The Bees is a horror story from the wasteland of blue-collar alcoholism, that terrain made so familiar to us by the quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth stories of Raymond Carver, and is highly effective. In his introduction Chabon mentions Henry James's ghost stories and, despite its white-trash setting and lurid finale, Chaon is reminiscent of the Master's use of horror to suggest ineffable emotional distress.

Nick Hornby also wins with a Twilight-Zone-ish story about a teenager who buys a VCR that allows him to see the future by fast-forwarding through live TV: at first he uses it to find out who is going to win next week's basketball game or what happens on Friends, but then discovers that the end of the world is nigh. (Oddly, he doesn't use it to win on the horses.)

Chabon's own effort is excellent: drawing on H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, his "inter-planetary romance" is set in an alternative mid-Victorian world where America is still an English colony and airships travel the world, and Chabon generously shares his pleasure in ye olde science-fiction with the reader.

Alternative pasts also play a part in Michael Moorcock's The Case of the Nazi Canary, where a British detective duo are commissioned by the Nazis to solve the murder of Hitler's beloved niece. It's the campest thing in the book and in the worst imaginable taste, and is hard to resist.

The hallmarks of genre writing at its least worthy are threadbare writing, crudely conceived, stereotyped characters, and vulgar sensationalism, and Michael Crichton gives us all three in Blood Doesn't Come Out. If you didn't already know that Crichton has no sense of humour, you would think he was taking the mickey.

The other megastar of the bestseller, Stephen King, doesn't give too good an account of himself either. The Tale of Grey Dick is a bit of portentous nonsense set in a mythical hayseed world, a kind of yokel Middle-earth (" 'May your first day in hell last ten-thousand years,' Roland murmured. Margaret nodded. 'Aye, and let that one be the shortest. A terrible toast, but one I'd gladly give each of the outlaws who dare to take our babies'. "). Perhaps I am not familiar enough with the conventions, but I had trouble working out what this story was about, and who the people in it were meant to be.

There are witches and archaeologists and homicidal elephants; there are monstrous sea creatures and the ghosts of Custer's army risen from the grave and tearing people to shreds.

The last page of Thrilling Tales promises a second instalment: having been a bit snooty about this one, I feel sheepish about admitting that I'm looking forward to it.